


kids cried out

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drabble Sequence, Episode: s01e06 FZZT, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-15
Updated: 2016-01-15
Packaged: 2018-05-14 04:49:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5730118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While Jemma struggles to find a cure for the Chitauri virus, her rescue appears - quite literally - out of thin air.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Halsey's "Control."
> 
> The first two chapters of this were originally posted on tumblr in response to first sentence prompts.

"Shh, it's okay, I won't let anyone hurt you."

“You understand if I don’t entirely believe you,” Jemma says. She continues searching the barren walls for opportunities for escape, even though she’s had well over an hour to realize there is no hope of it. The only way in or out of this room is teleportation.

He reaches for her and she scampers back. “You’re safe here,” he says, repeating that other man’s words. She shivers at the memory of his face.

“But _you’re_  not. You might not realize this, but I’m very contagious and there isn’t any cure.” She wraps her arms tighter around herself. “I was working on one…” She’s not sure how much time she has left anymore. If that last seizure was like the ones before it, she lost no more than a quarter of an hour. It’s likely been an hour and a half since she was abducted from the Bus. She closes her eyes. Minutes. That’s all she has left.

He grabs her wrist, his hold too firm to shake off. “Yeah,” he says sheepishly. “After Gordon realized he grabbed you by mistake, we kind of … looked into it.”

She shakes her head, afraid that if she tries to fight him, she’ll electrocute him and spread the disease. “Mistake?” she echoes. She doesn’t know who these people are or what they’re about, but they kidnapped her off the Bus in _mid-flight_  and were then apparently able to spy on SHIELD to find out what was wrong with her. She doesn’t like that one bit.

He takes her other wrist and she whimpers fearfully. “It’s okay,” he soothes, voice pitched like he’s talking to a wild animal. “We thought you were one of us. The electricity and the alien thing … it messed with Gordon’s radar. But now that you’re here, we’re gonna try to help you.”

“You’ll die.” She can feel the charge building steadily, worse than any that preceded her seizures thus far. “You need to call your friend, have him get you out of here. This room should be able to hold the pulse-”

“I know it can,” he interjects sternly, “because this is where I learned to keep my charge from bleeding out.” His hands twist gently on her arms, the sensation warm and smooth against the fire sparking beneath her skin. He nods to their feet and the lightning bolt scars dancing along the floor. “I made those.”

He pulls her closer, one hand wrapping around her waist and the other going to her temple. His mouth quirks. “I can feel it - right - here.” He taps the spot and a jolt goes from her head down to her toes. She arches into his body and he cradles her head at his neck. “I’m not leaving you,” he promises against her hair.

He’s going to die. Trying to what? To _save_  her? With nothing but a hope and a prayer? She should be pushing him away, demanding he leave, save himself, but she finds the prospect of dying in a stranger’s arms far too appealing when the alternative is facing the unknown all by her lonesome.

“I’m sorry,” she says into his shirt.

“Save it for after.”

Her joints hurt and there’s a buzzing in her skull. She wraps her arms around him as the pain grows. “I’m killing you and I don’t even know your name.”

She can feel his smile above her ear. “Lincoln,” is the last thing she hears before a crack of lightning charges through her.

 


	2. Chapter 2

“Do you have a gun I can borrow?”

“Why do you need a gun?” Lincoln asks, understandably cautious.

She looks around the room she’s been given - what she can see of it from the bed, anyway; they say she slept for two days and she’s _still_ not up to standing. The room is lovely, all warm woods and eclectic touches to make it feel homey. She can’t help but wonder if that’s because they intend on it being her home for quite a while. “It would make me feel better.” 

Lincoln smiles, trying to catch her eye. “No one’s gonna hurt you here.”

She closes her eyes rather than look at him. “You’re _holding_ me here,” she reminds him.

“We also saved your life. Remember that?”

Yes. She does. Her hand goes to her temple, where a bandage covers what is still a very raw wound (which is, she knows, far better than the ones she found on the dead firefighters). “That doesn’t change the fact that you’re holding me against my will.”

Lincoln sighs and settles into the chair beside her bed. 

“You’re kind of a problem,” he says, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his thighs. “This place, it’s a safe haven for people like me.”

“I’m not like you.”

“We know that. The Elders are still trying to decide how to handle the situation.”

“Elders?”

“Yeah. They’re kind of in charge. At least when big things come up.”

“And I’m a big thing?” she surmises. She doesn’t know why. She still doesn’t know who these people even _are_ \- aside from not quite human - or where she is. She was grabbed out of the Bus while it was flying over the Atlantic and dropped on what was definitely solid ground. There’s no telling where in the world she’s been brought.

“Afraid so.” Lincoln looks to the bright window and seems to decide something. She doesn’t dare get her hopes up that it will be to aid her in a daring escape. “There’s something you should know, and you should hear it from me.”

“Oh?” For some reason her mind flashes back to those last moments, when he held her in his arms. There was nothing sensual about it, but it was very intimate all the same. She was dying and he was choosing to risk his own life for her; she doesn’t know that there’s a word for that kind of connection.

“When you … pulsed? It was pretty violent. There was a lot of energy and it was all coming at once, I’ve never tapped into anything like that before.”

“And your point is?”

He drops his head briefly before forcing himself to face her. “You’re doing well. Motor function’s good. You’re speaking clearly.”

“ _Lincoln_.”

His eyes move to her abdomen. “There’s some scarring. I’m sorry.”

Suddenly curious, she pulls down the blanket and starts tugging at the complex knots holding closed the clothes they’ve got her in. Lincoln’s weight settles on the bed beside her leg.

“I’m a doctor,” he says and gently pulls at the bottom of the shirt, lifting it just far enough that she can see the pattern marking her right side. The color is an angry red but the pattern itself is almost beautiful. It looks like a leafy branch reaching down her ribs.

He tells her the marks with become less obvious, the color will fade along with the pain. His fingertips brush the raised skin and the cold makes her jump. He pulls back, looking guilty. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she says softly. “It doesn’t hurt.”

He holds her stare for long seconds and, absurdly, she grows self-conscious over her still-exposed abdomen and breaks the connection on pretense of carefully lowering her top.

“What type?” she asks.

“Huh?”

She smiles at his flummoxed expression. “What type of _doctor_ are you?”

“Oh, internal medicine.”

“Really?” she asks eagerly. She’s been wanting to speak to a real doctor about some of her concerns regarding her treatment of the team’s injuries. 

They talk so long that the sun sets and he has to get up to light candles. It’s not until he leaves that she remembers her initial fear at being kept here.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fast-forward a few months, Jemma's still at Afterlife.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An anon requested “Is there a reason you’re naked in my bed?”

There is something deeply unfair about this. That’s Lincoln’s first coherent thought. All his others are more monosyllabic grunts that resemble the names of body parts, which just goes to show how right he is about the unfair thing.

He’s just come back to his room after the longest meeting of his _life_ with Jiaying and the elders (his entire first year of residency wasn’t even that bad); all he wants to do is go to sleep. And yet the first thing he sees when he walks through his door is Jemma, her pale skin lit up by the moonlight streaming through the cracks in his shutters. _All_ of her pale skin.

The light blanket that usually sits in a non-decorative heap at the end of his bed is mostly crumpled up under one of her arms, with one corner trailing over her hip to protect her modesty. That’s what he tells himself. The essentials are covered so it doesn’t matter that he’s … staring like a pervert.

He doesn’t realize he’s crossed the room until he’s standing over her, reaching for her. He snatches his hand away and turns his back on her.

 _This_ is what the Elders were talking about when they kept harping on his “attachment” to her, why Jiajing kept shooting him sympathetic looks every time he tried to justify himself saying he was just being _nice_ to her. She’s a prisoner here - no matter how they’ve tried to pretend otherwise, today proves that - and doesn’t she deserve some common courtesy? Some friendship?

What he’s feeling now isn’t friendly.

His eye catches the lightning scars along her ribs. They glow and shimmer in the moonlight, almost like electricity’s still dancing just under her skin.

 _And_ he’s reaching again. Fuck him, this is bad.

He grabs an extra quilt to lay over her. Maybe it’s the weight, maybe it’s the sound of him moving around, but she blinks awake when he’s only got it halfway up her body. She twists to face him and he doesn’t look away quite fast enough to avoid a glimpse of her breast. Dammit.

“Lincoln?” she asks, sounding way too kissably sleepy.

“Jemma,” he says to the headboard. “Is there a reason you’re naked in my bed?”

She seems to realize she’s naked only after he’s said it and clutches the quilt to her chest. He relaxes now that she’s covered and sinks to sit on the edge of the mattress. It’s a little too close for comfort, but it also means he can keep his back to her without being rude, so he’ll take it over the chair.

“I- forgot to change,” she says. It’s a little muffled by the knees she’s pulled to her chest.

“Change?” he echoes.

She picks at the fraying edges of one of the quilt squares. “I suppose they called you back because of what happened this morning?”

He hisses in a breath. _What happened this morning_ was Jemma trying to escape. And that was part of it, yeah, but it’s not _all_ of it. The added security on her is probably why she hasn’t noticed that Afterlife is full to bursting. _Everyone_ \- transitioned and not - has been called back in the wake of HYDRA’s coming out party. The Elders are pretty much agreed Jemma’s too nice to be one of them - hell, most of them think she’s too nice to be _SHIELD_ (that or she’s playing all of them) - but Lincoln was told that under no circumstances is he to tell her about what’s happened. If the Elders tell her, it will be when _they_ decide it’s necessary.

“I forgot to change out of my muddy clothes before sneaking over here,” she says, “and I didn’t want to risk two more trips just for that. I _intended_ on stealing a shirt from your drawers-”

 _Fuck._  His mouth goes dry and he fists his hands on his knees until his palms _sting_  so he can get that image out of his head. How it’s more enticing than the one he found when he walked, he can’t say, but it definitely is.

“-but I was so tired I suppose I just fell into bed.”

“Ah,” he says, giving himself a little more time to think with his brain. “And you snuck over here, the night after you tried to run away, because…?”

He can feel he feet shifting behind him and from the corner of his eye he sees her turn away from him.

“Because I sleep here sometimes,” she says softly, “when I’m lonely or frightened. It helps to... It helps.”

The lust washes away, replaced by the familiar guilt. It’s way too easy to imagine Jemma, in her first few weeks here, sneaking across the narrow alley between their rooms for a little comfort and finding him gone.

This room is his, but it’s not his _home_. That’s on the other side of the world and he can go there anytime he wants - so long as Gordon’s up to the trip. Jemma can’t.

He’s not even sure she has a home to go back to if she could.

When the Elders told him he couldn’t tell her, he was angry, but now he wonders if they were right for the wrong reasons. After her failed escape attempt, hearing the organization she’s been fighting so hard to get back to is gone? That some of the friends she left behind might be traitors would would kill her if they saw her now? She doesn’t deserve that.

“Scoot over,” he sighs and pushes his way in beside her.

She melts readily into him, fitting perfectly under his arm. There’s nothing he can say that won’t remind her he’s one of the people keeping her here, so he just wraps his arms around her and gives her something solid to hold onto. When slow-falling drops of moisture start seeping through the front of his shirt, he pulls her tighter to his chest.

 


End file.
